I have received 8 SalesForce.com certifications and have been using SalesForce for nearly 9 years and have learned a lot about the system. I have used it to migrate companies from past on premise systems to the cloud. I have also handled all data migrations and even moved one organization from Unlimited Edition to Enterprise Edition through setting up a new system and migrating all data. I believe in the vision in SalesForce and want to help others leverage its power.

Thursday, November 12, 2015

SalesForce Marketing Cloud - what is it?

As you likely have notice, SalesForce is really pushing the idea of "clouds" for their products. For example, the core SalesForce CRM you are likely well versed in comes with the Sales Cloud (opportunities, price books, etc.) and the Service Cloud (cases, entitlements, Milestone's, etc). But there are also so many other clouds. Two of the other big ones are the Community and Marketing Cloud.

The Marketing Cloud is actually a set of third party tools that were recently acquired by SalesForce to round out their Marketing offerings. It includes email marketing (powered by ExactTarget), Social Media Monitoring (powered by Buddy Media and Radian6) and more.

Each of the tools included within the Marketing Cloud, while branded as Marketing Cloud, are still somewhat separate tools in a UI designed to make them look like a comprehensive solution. For example, the email marketing tool can not send out emails based on the activity seen by Radian6 yet. One day the Marketing Cloud will likely do all this, but joining all these different technology products into a cohesive and comprehensive tool takes time. It is that time that tools like Marketo should fear as SalesForce will have a comprehensive tool that does everything their tool does, but also have the powerful Sales and Service Clouds to power it and make appropriate business decisions.

That being said, the tools presently available are powerful. ExactTarget, the email marketing tool, has no shortage of ways to send personalized emails to your subscribers and track their activity. The Radian6 tool gives you a be comprehensive view of what your brand is doing on Social Media, but also how people on social media are interacting with it.

We will do an in depth review of each the Marketing Cloud aspects in the future. But wanted to give you a quick overview and food for thought about what it does, and how it doesn't all yet interconnect.